Tuesday, November 25, 2008

I know, random right? Well, I was chopping onions a while back and couldn't resist taking a picture of the little guys...

what do you think? Onion army? Art subject? I'm thinking both.

In other news.. We woke up to this on Saturday

I was so excited that we had some snow! I've been waiting with baited breath to see if we'd get any snow this year after the measly dusting we had last year. Little did I know what was in store..

THIS is what we woke up to on Sunday morning!!! Talk about exciting! It melted by midday but it brought such joy to my heart to see beautiful white snow again! We have high hopes that this means a nice, white winter. Hopefully next time we'll get to go check out the beach as well - a snowy beach! How exciting :)

We did venture to the castle on a roundabout walk to church and got some nice shots of a snowy castle.

We are anticipating some fun events in the next few days which I will be sure to update on next week :) Until then, I leave you with a shot of my studious husband...

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

About a month ago one of my friends here approached me with the idea of commissioning me to do a painting as a surprise for her husband’s birthday. She was very trusting because she has never seen any of my work! But, her husband has a love for pelicans, and I have a love for birds and painting, so we decided to give it a shot. I wasn’t allowed to tell ANYONE because she’s never successfully surprised him before, so my lips have been sealed :) Until today! Because his birthday was yesterday.

I really enjoyed getting back into oil painting a bit after a long fling with watercolor and acrylic on paper. It was interesting to see the evolution of my approach to oils as I incorporated a lot of my ‘usuals’ that I would normally only do with watercolor or acrylic paint. There is a lot of layering and the use of paper shapes in the background, and then the pelican itself is only nice thick paint. I used to fear thick paint. If I couldn’t see through the layer it made me uncomfortable, but with this little guy I went for it nice and chunky :) Those are a type of Australian fish in the background that this Australian pelican would be very likely to eat. Some of the papery texture you may (or may not) be able to see is the addition of a formation of circles cut from a dress pattern that showed the overlapping nesting areas of pelicans. All in all, I think it was pretty successful and I am definitely excited to start the next one!

Monday, November 03, 2008

A little over a week ago we joined our good friends, the Tallons, for some chili and and some pumpkin carving (not to mention the post-carving party in which we had our first exposure to the X-Factor!). The chili was delicious and warm and the pumpkins were nice and goopy. It was Isaiah’s first time carving a pumpkin so he was very excited…

And, well.. So was Ian..

I was too – I LOVE carving pumpkins! I’m no good at it, but I love the fall season and everything that comes with it (except Halloween.. I don’t like Halloween). And, Holly even roasted the seeds for us to enjoy the next day!

Here is Isaiah with all of the pumpkins.. this was after the bath :).

And this is my attempt at getting all of us in a photo..

Apparently I think I’m enormous. I tried setting up the shot two different times and still had a ton of room on my side. Fortunately, Luke has a much better grip on the physical world than I do, and he was able to take a great shot that you can find here.

I also got some fun shots of them with their candles in the dark.

Here you will find Mr. and Mrs. Church.. I bet you can’t guess whose is whose! :)

You’ll notice that one of us went to great lengths to carve fleshy teeth into his (oops! did I say his?? :) pumpkin’s face and they came out quite nicely.

We didn’t have quite the Reformation Day celebration that we had last year because one of us (I’ll let you guess again) had a boat-load of work to do this week and tried really hard to get it all done before Friday night so that we could have a big get-together, but to no avail. BUT, I was able to finish enough work that we were able to have Sara and Shawn over last minute, and Shawn and Ian drank German beer and we enjoyed Luther once again.

The Team

"Ready, Team?"

I use it when we're leaving the house, buckled up in the car, starting a movie night, playing a game.. basically all the time. The phrase is my automatic check-in to make sure we're all on the same page. It's a happy accident that all our children's names begin with the letter 'A', so they are also often referred to as the A-Team.

This blog is about our team. We analyze, we hope, we ask, we get excited, we laugh, we're regular. Sort of. We are interested in what is real and think that just about everything is at least a little interesting. This is our place to play, to muse, and to remember.